The past is another party?

One unexpected, common thread turned up at the duelling political conventions in Canada this weekend — a distrust of Liberals.

Conservatives punctuated their gathering in Vancouver with frequent shots at Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his new government — no surprise.

But the new management of the Liberal party also fired some well-aimed shots at the Liberal party of the past. Conservatives, in short, don’t like the new Liberal party, and new Liberals aren’t all that fond of the old Liberal party.

The Prime Minister himself described Liberals of bygone days in pretty harsh terms in his big speech to the Winnipeg convention on Saturday. Trudeau made it abundantly clear that he sees the new Liberal constitution — which was passed after some spirited debate in Winnipeg — as essentially a shovel to bury the party’s past.

“The party constitution we have today is a product of the era we worked so hard, together, to put behind us,” he said. “The era of factional battles and hyphenated Liberals; of regional chieftains and behind-the-scenes power-brokers. Of the closed, insular thinking that almost killed this party.”

He exhorted Liberals to “finally and firmly close the book on a painful era in our party’s history.”

Trudeau’s chief of staff, Katie Telford, offered an even more colourful picture of the Trudeau team’s out-with-the-old approach when she spoke to the convention the day before. She was describing how difficult it was to get on top of the Liberals’ complicated rules when Trudeau took over the party.

“Sometimes it wasn’t easy. Whether it was me — because yes, I did this — throwing the Liberal party constitution, respectfully, of course, against the wall, or should I say the 18 Liberal party constitutions against the wall, before falling asleep with it on the night table for months after the leadership convention.”

The only thing more complicated than the Liberals’ old constitution is its complex web of relationships: old friends, old feuds.

The new constitution, for those who weren’t following closely, streamlines the Liberal party into a far less cumbersome organization: gone are provincial associations as well as membership fees and privileges. Trudeau’s team would prefer that you refer to the Liberals now as a “movement,” not a party, or as former interim leader Bob Rae said in the constitutional debate on Saturday afternoon, “a private club.”

But that’s a lot of history and culture to bury. The only thing more complicated than the Liberals’ old constitution is its complex web of relationships: old friends, old feuds.

So it’s entirely possible to see the recent constitutional debate within the Liberal party as a proxy for the party’s desired culture shift overall. Newcomers to the Liberal fold often need a roadmap to understand which players are aligned and which people cannot be put in the same room.

Trudeau wants the party to start now with a blank slate, relationship-wise —presumably everyone is going to be friends.

But, of course, he runs the risk of creating a whole new set of personal resentments with his eagerness to distance the new team from the Liberals of old. And it should be pointed out: it’s actually a bit of tradition for new leaders of the party to have an uneasy relationship with predecessors. John Turner was no fan of Pierre Trudeau’s when he took over from him in 1984; bad blood existed between Turner and Jean Chretien, who took over in 1990, and Chretien and Paul Martin — well, everyone knows that story.

Those familiar with that checkered past permitted themselves a small smile on Saturday when Trudeau said the Liberal party didn’t have a history of holding grudges. Really? Some of us filled a lot of newspaper pages with the ongoing saga of those grudge matches.

To be fair, though, Trudeau and his team probably headed off some future grudges when they tempered their proposal for a new constitution to take account of dissent heard all over the Winnipeg convention. By the time the proposal passed easily with its needed two-thirds of support on the convention floor on Saturday afternoon, Liberals seemed more or less like one big happy family. Though that term has also gone out of fashion in the Liberal party: the new folks don’t want anyone to think that blood is thicker than water, even if the current leader is the son of one of its more popular, long-serving leaders.

No question, though, with this new, streamlined constitution, there is really only one boss of the Liberal party. Time will tell how this works out: one person’s “streamlined” party could well be considered another person’s highly centralized party. Trudeau, who has said he doesn’t like centralizing power, says he’s going to use this nimble, new authority to keep the grassroots involved and engaged.

“We found that there were a lot of levels of the party that were actually interfering in connecting the Liberal leadership to the Liberal grassroots,” he said at his news conference.

Two years from now, when Liberals hold their next convention, they will have a chance to review the complete, structural overhaul they made this weekend. They’ll be able to judge whether it really did revitalize a party into a “movement,” whether Trudeau is really in better touch with the grassroots and, maybe most importantly, whether they’re more fond of the new party than the old party that was so roundly criticized in Winnipeg.

The views, opinions and positions expressed by all iPolitics columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of iPolitics.

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Susan Delacourt is one of Canada's best-known political journalists. Over her long career she has worked at some of the top newsrooms in the country, from the Toronto Star and the Globe and Mail to the Ottawa Citizen and the National Post. She is a frequent political panelist on CBC Radio and CTV. Author of four books, her latest — Shopping For Votes — was a finalist for the prestigious Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Canadian non-fiction in 2014. She teaches classes in journalism and political communication at Carleton University.